It had made me recoil a little, and then, looking up again, it was Kit’s eyes, looking at me with concern and worry and just a little apologetic at having startled me. So I wasn’t sure. It was the weirdest feeling in the world sitting there, right next to my husband, and not being sure he was my husband. Not being sure he wasn’t a stranger, the almost mythical Jarl Ingemar. The creature who was killing my husband.
So I wasn’t giving my full attention to Zen, either. But the third time she said we couldn’t have gone to Earth in the Hopper, I sat up and noticed and said, “Of course not. Eden ships aren’t prepared for entry into the atmosphere. But we were provisioned for return,” I said. “They told us to provision both instruments and parts and…food and all, for the return trip, so they…”
Zen’s hiss of desperation told me she’d answered this before, as did the way she turned to me and lowered her eyebrows. “Listen, Thena, why the hell do you care what they thought?”
“The idea,” Doc Bartolomeu said, “was for us to set the Hopper in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a decaying orbit, of course—we don’t have the ability to do much more—but it wouldn’t decay that fast in two or three weeks, at most, and I hoped we wouldn’t take longer than that on Earth. Then we’d take the lifeboat to Earth proper, and return in it to the Hopper.”
“And I’m saying,” Zen said. “That the Hopper will not be in an orbit, decaying or otherwise for more than a couple of weeks, before it becomes so much cosmic dust. At this point, I’m telling you, Doctor Bartolomeu, the hull is decaying.”
I dragged my hands backward through my hair and thought lovingly of bug juice. No, my personality hadn’t changed at all. I still hated bug juice. But the coffee maker had, incongruously, been one of the first things infected with and devoured by the bacteria. And I needed caffeine. But I’d been dragged here, with no time to get any. My head was at that foggy stage that foretells a huge headache. “When did the hull start decaying? I thought you said it was imposs—”
“Not impossible. Very difficult. But these…loving organisms were apparently created to become more vicious as generations went on. Lucky, lucky us.”
“So we use the lifeboat,” Doc said, slowly. “I suppose we’ll have to find a ship to return to Eden, but…”
“The lifeboat is gone,” I said. “It has been cannibalized for parts to keep us going.”
“You what?” This was from Kit—or at least I presumed from Kit, in an outraged tone. “Didn’t you realize we would need it?”
“Chill it, Highness,” said Zen in mordant mode, and either Kit was not quite himself, or Zen believed so, since Highness was her nickname for what she called Jarl Eruptions. “We realized that without the parts from the lifeboat we’d not be able to keep breathing, which seemed kind of a priority for us at the time. But don’t fret,” she said condescendingly. “If it makes you feel better, those parts are infected too. More so, even if Thena and I should spend the next two days frantically rebuilding the lifeboat, at the end we’d have a well-organized pile of dust.”
I blinked. Even I hadn’t realized the situation was that dire.
“Oh, please. There has to be something you can do. Despair is a cover for incompetence,” Jarl said, and that time I was sure it was Jarl. My husband was not sweetness and light. Had never been. When cornered and pushed, he was quite capable of behaving like the sphincter of the universe, lashing out first and thinking last. But he would never have said those words. Ever. Kit was a kind man. What was more, he’d been raised in a society of equals. Those were the words of someone who had commanded long enough that he thought he could use his words as a whip upon his serfs and that this would, somehow, magically, bring forth a solution.
I turned a little and saw him open his mouth again, and Doc interrupted. “Not now. You’re not adding anything to this conversation, and you can’t whistle a solution out of thin air.” He paused. “Nor can I. I’ll confess I don’t see anything for us to do, except perhaps use those nice suicide pills from the—”
“Like fun,” I said. It came out of my mouth before I could stop it. “I’ll see Castaneda in the hell of my choice before I kill myself and disappear from his radar letting him do whatever the hell he wants with Eden.”
“Well, I’ll be damned if I know what else we can do.” That was definitely Jarl, too. Or I thought so. Kit would never have said he would be damned. It was not that Edenites were not religious—a lot of them were extremely pious. But the way their minds worked, the idea of being damned would seem odd, as opposed to the idea of damning yourself.
“You probably will be damned,” I said, in agreeable tones. “But that does not mean that we have to be as well. What I want you two to do is get us around Circum. Some of the bays at the back are unused or rarely used. Hover there, so we can go into Circum. From there, perhaps we can steal a ship to get to Earth.
“It won’t be that easy,” I said. I was coming awake despite myself, partly under the influence of the feeling of cold shock and horror of having Kit’s body, but not Kit, sitting beside me. Was Kit all gone? Was the battle lost? My heart hammered somewhere near my throat, but I damn well would not cry, not in front of…not in front of whatever remained of Kit. I’d read about split personalities. I’d read a lot about it, since we’d found out about this. Despite the insane work schedules, I’d found time to look through educational holos on split personalities. They had let us bring all kinds of informational holos aboard the Hopper, provided they didn’t give away anything about Eden. Psychology was one of the subjects most thoroughly covered.
Psychology, of course, had not come into its own until the twenty-second century, when we’d understood perfectly what the fine tuning of brain and chemicals could do. Anything else, from psychoanalysis to gen-psy had never been more than a faint effort to paste patches of faith over ignorance. Religion by any other name, and, like religion, it had sometimes effected miracle cures, but not with any level of reliability.
Multiple personalities were one of those things that even our psychology couldn’t fully explain. It was almost like it required a metaphysical belief in the soul.
Of course, most cases had a physical trigger, and most cases could almost be explained by the physical trigger. But the way the personalities divided the internal space, the access to the senses and modes of communication…I’d read that EEG recordings even revealed that multiple personalities were unique in how they activated the brain. It really was as if two different persons traded off control of mind and body. None of this made any sense in terms of simple physiological mechanics. Something more was needed.
Unexplained though it was, I understood that a secondary personality sometimes persisted, crouched, as it were, within the body, able to hear and see, but not to do anything about it, or at least not until something made the dominant personality hand off control. I didn’t know how this would play with the nessies’ refashioning of the brain, but even there I remembered that Doc had said something about some of the dosage spilled on the floor of the biowomb center where Jarl and his wife had died.
What if not quite enough had got there? What if the brain would never fully be refashioned? What if enough of Kit remained in there that he could hear me? I didn’t dare say anything to increase what must already be unbearable despair. If I conceded the fight lost, if I treated Jarl as a stranger, as though no part of him were Kit, would that contribute to whatever was left of Kit letting go? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.
“It won’t be easy to steal a ship from Circum even if there are vast areas that have been abandoned. I believe at some point Circum was a space station, or grew around a space station and into a center of powerpod collection.”
“Over the late twenty-first century,” Doc and Jarl said in remarkable unison.
“Good. Fine. But what that means is that there are vast abandoned portions. There might be many things in those areas, but one thing I can guarantee is that there will be no ships that we can take to Earth an
d besides—”
Doc cleared his throat, as though he would speak, but I gave him no time. “And besides,” I said, firmly. “If we are really infected with that sort of bacteria that will eat through everything it touches, getting more vicious as its generations multiply, should we do this? I know the rest of you will not be very fond of Earthworms and you have no reason to be. But I visited Circum before…” My voice swelled with tears suddenly, and I had to make an effort to control it. I swallowed hard. “Before Kit rescued me. I made friends with harvesters. They’re not the Good Men. They have no power of any sort that could hurt us. They don’t deserve to die as Circum fails. Worse than that,” I added. “If Circum disintegrates and takes with it all of Earth’s ability to collect powerpods—”
“Eden’s problems are solved?” Kit’s mouth said, and the annoying thing there is that I wasn’t utterly sure it wasn’t Kit this time. It was the sort of remark he would make to lighten the mood.
“The Earth will starve. They’re all depending on this energy. By the time they’ve retrofitted their technology to take new forms of energy, two-thirds of the Earth will be dead. Or more. And a generation might have passed, and most technology and know-how will be lost. I can’t have that on my conscience, any more than I can have failing Eden.”
“Are you suggesting we kill ourselves?” Zen asked, unbelievingly.
You know when you look down at an endless abyss and you feel the call to just let go, just let yourself fall? You know death lies there, waiting for you, but just at the moment it seems preferable to whatever else you’re facing, whatever else you know you need to do.
In this case, death, for all of us, would leave me without having to wonder who my husband was. Was I even married to him when his body was taken over by someone else? And if I weren’t what did it mean? Where had Kit gone? I realized with a shock that my feeling amounted to wanting my husband back and, failing that, taking my toys and going home. For a definition of home.
But I thought of Kath and her children. My death might end it for me—I’d never thought much about life afterwards, and didn’t want to think about it now. I’d be out of it. But Kit’s family wouldn’t. They’d have to live under the whims of a dictator. From what we’d already seen of Castaneda, ranging from energy rationing to trying to kill Kit, once he had power he could rival the worst monsters on Earth. Children would grow up being treated like things.
I knew, in retrospect, that’s what had twisted me, being raised as a replacement body for Father. But at least to the rest of the world and in my mind, I’d counted. I’d been human. But these kids would have nowhere to go.
“Thena, that’s not like you. You know better than anyone you have to fight. While you can fight, you fight. You know as long as you’re alive you have them surrounded.”
I turned, and looking at me from the green cat-shaped eyes, was my husband. No two ways about it. “Kit,” I said, in a flood or relief that he was still there. That he still existed and was coherent enough to take over, to talk. I stretched my hand on the table, to touch his hand, and he clasped my hand hard. “Don’t give up,” he said, his voice low. “I haven’t. Doc has…slowed it down. And I’m still here. I’m still fighting.”
“What…what does it feel like?” I had no experience of being under siege in my own brain.
“Like being in a labyrinth,” he said. “Stumbling around trying to figure out which memories and thoughts are mine and which aren’t. There’s memory and…and knowledge leak. Like when we were linked, Thena, when I was…dying…” His turn to pause and swallow. “But the best, perhaps the only thing we can do for me is get us all to Earth as fast as possible, so Doc can get Jarl’s notes and the access to machines, and figure out how to stop and reverse this. He…took an impression of my brain, before it was too…too far gone, so it should be possible to restore that, which means there might be a little voice at the back of my mind, but not…this.” He paused. “So we need to get to Earth,” his hand squeezed mine. “And we need to get to Earth fast.”
A pause again, and he continued, “There has been leaking of memories and information, and I know what the Doctor was about to say. There are vehicles in the abandoned areas. They were stored there for the last leg to the Reviens. They had intended to take a lot more people. Not just the Mules who stayed behind, but some of the…improved people, who got caught or trapped and killed before they could make it. About double the ones who did make it to the ship. There are fueled, abandoned vehicles no one knows about, hidden in the abandoned areas.” I started to open my mouth, but he cut me off. “You can’t say we can’t do it, Thena. You can’t say it. You can’t tell me I have to just let him…that I have to just die.”
“No,” I said. “We do have to fight to survive. We have to find a way. But…we can’t kill Earth. The price…”
“The price shouldn’t be paid by others?” Kit said. “I think maybe that’s what made Irena Ingemar recoil from Doc’s and Jarl’s plan.” He rubbed the tip of his nose with his free hand. It was very much a Kit gesture. It was a gesture made instead of wiping at his eyes. I had no idea what in what he’d said had triggered tears, but it had. Maybe it was the feeling that he was one of the others paying. Or not. Kit didn’t cry for himself, ever. “I agree with that. I’ve seen Earth, and we’ve been helped, even, on Earth.” A brief smile. “The broomers might be many things, but they’re not worthy of death by starvation. We will not risk it. I will…There is a way.” He swallowed. “We will get to the side of Circum where the boats are stored. We can do that. Then get close enough that we can reach it. And then rope-crawl to it.”
Zen was looking at him, intently, her eyes narrowed, as though trying to decide which of them was talking and what it meant. “We’d still take the bacteria with us to Circum,” she said.
“No.” This was the doctor, frowning. “No. Not if we disinfect carefully, before getting into our suits. We’ll need to be in our suits to go across.” He frowned. “I take it the suits aren’t infected?”
“The suits are, in a way, alive,” Zen said. “And so far it hasn’t touched living material. Besides, I’ve disinfected the suit storage every day, just in case. It can only be done thoroughly in a very small area, but fortunately the suit storage is a very small area. They’re clean.”
“Then we’ll get clean ourselves, before we put them on. And we’ll disinfect the rope, too.”
“But the exterior of the suits,” Zen said. “They’ll pick up bacteria as we go. They will be teeming by the time we get to Circum. If we can get there through these acrobatics. Who is going to be the first one to go out? I can see that the rest of us will be able to hang onto the rope to get there, but if there’s any distance at all, how is the first one to get there?”
“Don’t worry,” Kit’s voice sounded strangely doubled, like he was speaking in unison with himself, one voice reassuring and one supremely confident. He stopped, then resumed with his voice, only. “I’ll let him take over for the time. He has more experience in vacuum than I do. Thena, he helped seed the powertrees. All of them did. He…he’s not…In other circumstances, I’d go some way to save him. Yes, he’s arrogant, and in many ways he’s cold, but…his childhood was—” He stopped so abruptly that his lips made a snapping sound. And the tone if not the voice changed, though he didn’t let go of my hand. “Touching, but I don’t want to be justified. Neither do I wish to die completely, just so some young wastrel can go on with a life he wasn’t doing much with. No, he’s not bad enough to deserve to die, but you have to ask yourself, which of us is more useful to most people?”
I pulled at my hand, recoiling away from him. “Human lives aren’t measured in usefulness.” I had been raised to believe I must be useful to justify myself. I must be the perfect Good Man’s daughter, the perfect little Patrician. My job was to grow up socially adept, to make a good show of the reasons that the Good Men deserved power. And to marry and have children. Never mind. Those had been lies. Not the children part, but
the rest. I’d been a body only, grown to be used. And I felt very strongly that humans couldn’t be measured in usefulness, or not that way.
Take my friend Fuse, for instance. He was a poor scrap of humanity. The clone of a Good Man, intended to be used for a transplant, he’d got wind of it and tried to escape. His escape had taken him through an ancient piece of dock machinery, and he’d got caught in it and mangled badly. One of his legs dragged, his whole body was lopsided and twisted. And his mind was, at best, the mind of a six year old.
Poor piece of scrap at best. Our broomers lair looked after him, because they had to have rules to keep the sanity of their members. And one of the rules was that one didn’t abandon one’s own. And Fuse—broken, seemingly useless Fuse—was one of us.
So we cleaned up after him, and saw that he was fed, and when it became obvious that the accident had turned his incipient pyromania into a full-blown obsession, we made sure that he didn’t blow up or set fire to anything too big or too obvious, or which might kill us and him.
But it had been Fuse, late at night, in a despairing time, through a random firing of memories, who had recalled what our fathers were and what they intended to do with all of us. And that moment of lucidity, soon overwhelmed by the wreck that was the rest of Fuse, had made it possible for me to figure out the plot against us and how to circumvent it. It had saved my life and Kit’s and probably half a dozen of our fellow broomers—maybe eventually all of them.
Jarl, who couldn’t hear my thoughts, laughed at my pronouncement and shrugged. “At any rate, my host in this body and myself are in perfect agreement on one thing. We must get out of this death-trap of a ship and onto a place where our life can sustain itself. And then everything else can be decided. But not if we’re dead. Yeah, I can vacuum-swim, and this body is more agile, more…precise than mine ever was. The ELFing, I suppose. I can get your damn rope to Circum.”
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